Asystole ✷ Mark Sloan

𝟬𝟰𝟯 a hard days night

"And that vegan crap is?" His reply caused her to huff, "Go on, princess, how would you go?"

"Well..."

She paused as if she hadn't given it much thought at all. Her voice grew quiet. I knew Faith's type. She was ambitious but had tumbled into the surgical internship despite not having the stomach for gore. 

She brushed her dark hair over her shoulder and winced at the image in her head. I knew the image, we'd all been envisioning it over the past 14 hours: a semi-truck driving straight at you. Ashley whimpered in the background.

"Definitely not something violent—"

"When I was a kid, I was obsessed with the whole 'all guns blazing'," Liam appeared from the restroom, running his hands through his hair as he hauled his gym bag onto a bench beside Faith. He let out a very miffed laugh. Out of everyone, he and Ashley were the only people who had bothered to really talk to me. "Always thought it was cool to go out with a bang—"

"Where are you expecting that to happen?" Challenged Isaac, raising his eyebrows at Liam's childhood fantasy. I took another bite of my apple but the sound was too loud, it caused Ashley to flinch as she stared at all of us with watery eyes. "Ain't going to be time for that or room for that at Manhattan West."

Isaac reminded me of the sort of rednecks you saw on television, he reminded me of Joe Exotic sometimes in the way that he'd slip into his southern drawl when the slightest bit confrontational and a lack of engagement with reality— which, with Isaac, was all the time.

 Compared to him, Liam was a frat boy, the sort of guy you'd expect to only exist on college campuses and turn to dust when the sun came up and the underage drinking stopped. Although, Liam Carmichael was smart (too smart, he was leaving us all in the dust) and was 30, not 20.

I kept quiet as Liam and Isaac bantered back and forth, Isaac always taking conversations a little too seriously. Ever so often, I would check on Ashley out of the corner of my eye; she was brushing her hair in the mirror, blinking back more tears. 

I felt my heartache for her but refrained from going to comfort her. What I'd learnt about Ashley was that she didn't like the attention, she preferred to just emote in peace. She was still listening to the conversation but did so half-heartedly as if she'd never wanted to ask the question anyway.

"You never know what's going to happen," Liam claimed, holding his hands up as I tuned back into their squabble. I couldn't believe my ears sometimes— two fully grown men fighting over the way to die? Imagine that. "One day, you're minding your business and boom, there's a psycho shooting up your hospital—"

"Don't joke about that," Faith interjected, eyes flashing. "That's terrible to joke about— people die from stuff like that every day—"

"People die from old age too... but it's okay to joke and talk about that— right?"

Forever the pessimist, Isaac found it within himself to round on Faith, suddenly defending the same guy he'd been fighting with. She just sighed loudly. If it'd been me, I would've flipped him off. Instead, Faith, despite barely having spoken to me during the last three months of our internship, shot me a look as if to ask me to help her. 

She did that often: 'help,' it said, 'you, me and Ashley are the only girls out of the 25 surgical interns in this hospital, we need to stick together.' 

I pretended that I missed it.

"Fine, I hope you get shot in a hospital mass shooting and die," She bit back with commendable venom and Isaac blinked at her, visibly taken aback.